


the absence of death

by khepria



Category: Mushishi
Genre: Chromatic Source, Chromatic Yuletide, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:29:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khepria/pseuds/khepria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This place is supposed to be a miracle ground that will grant with Kumado vision that he was not born with. A transitional world in-between where mushi are born and where humans live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the absence of death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jan/gifts).



> alright, it would be disingenuous to myself if i said this was _not_ a challenge to write because i had absolutely no prior knowledge of this canon before starting to write this piece. started anew and watched some episodes and indulged a bit in the manga! i'm not quite sure if i captured the atmosphere i had envisioned for this piece, but i assure that as i burrow deeper into canon, i will be sure to come back to this piece and revise and add onto it. i hope at the very least, it is satisfying to read _something_ on kumado even if not fully fleshed out by a fan of many years.
> 
> thank-you so much for this opportunity to not only introduce me into a _very interesting_ series, but also in challenging me to capture a voice of a character that i fell very quickly in love with and hope to continue writing in the future.
> 
> and as always, i would like to extend an appreciative thank-you to kuruk for being the company for my misery as we mutually try to find inspiration before the heavy pressure of a deadline impacts and settles our lungs.
> 
> cheers! happy yuletide!

 

 

 

 

This place is supposed to be a miracle ground that will grant with Kumado vision that he was not born with. A transitional world in-between where _mushi_ are born and where humans live. Kumado walks beside his grandfather, who bears a lantern to illuminate the way. They walk side by side, close enough for their sleeves to glide against each other, for their fingers to occasionally graze but never interlocking. The dread concentrates within Kumado, dense and sloshing ice water in his abdomen. 

“You will be living here from now on until you can see them,” his grandfather says to Kumado. They walk deeper and deeper into nothingness without holding hands until the lamplight barely grazes the wood panelling of a tiny hut—Kumado’s temporary home. “You must not set foot outside of here,” he warns, raising the lantern to better illuminate the housing. It is perhaps five or six tatami mats big. 

Kumado is already nodding before his grandfather asks him if he understands. Apprehension roots itself in his gut, stem growing along his esophagus, and its flower blossoming in his mouth seeking warmth of sunshine that Kumado never in his lifetime asks for. Part of being an obedient son is always listening to what elders tell you. They never ask him if he wanted to call this place home, but he must.

 

 

*

 

 

The relief that Kumado feels whenever he sees dim light illuminating the paper door separating him from the outside purgatory is goosebump inducing, not unlike the way cool pond water and chilly summer evenings chills his skin. His grandfather is coming and it is consoling to know that someone in this world remembered him. It reassures him that this is all transient and that his real home is waiting for him, and it is with cheery spirits that Kumado waits by the increasingly luminous door screen until his grandfather is standing on the steps of the house entrance. Kumado moves back to the other side of the room while his grandfather fumbles with the door, feigning ignorance and folds his legs underneath him, resting his thighs on his calves. “Welcome,” and Kumado almost says home but this is _not_ home. He stutters, and “home” transforms to “grandfather” at the very last moment clumsily on his tongue.

“Ah,” replies his grandfather. The lamp light emphasizes his tired face and the shadows deepened the depth of the elderly man’s wrinkles and made him look more frail than Kumado remembered his grandfather being. Like crinkled, faded parchment. Or maybe wisps of smoke from lit incense that is well and elegantly defined until you blow the tiniest of breaths against it, and its shape disfigures and disintegrates before your eyes. “Has nothing changed?” he asks.

Embarrassment stings and guilt sloshes in his gut. “Sometimes,” Kumado starts, feeling duller. “I think I can hear something further down the path.”

“Ah,” his grandfather says again with furrowed eyebrows. “Maybe soon then.” A vague promise of the future without definition, like a lot of things his grandfather tells him that did not relate to their clan history. Kumado knows that it isn’t disappointment because how can one be disappointed without having expectation, but it is difficult not to think of it as anything but. Kumado wishes that he had inherited his grandfather’s eyes so he wouldn’t have to be here in this cave in this futile penance. He doesn’t even know how long he has been living here despite counting the hours spent in darkness until sleep comes and he can find refuge in unconsciousness.

His grandfather sets down the tray of food, a soft clatter against tatami, and carefully moves the oil lamp off the tray and places it aside.

“Thank-you for the meal,” Kumado recites with clapped hands and a bowed head. He picks up the bowl of lukewarm miso and swirls it gently in his hands, resuspending and distributing the hazy grounded soybean and rice kernels in the soup, before setting it back down onto his tray. With his bamboo chopsticks, Kumado meticulously breaks apart the broth-softened chunks of yam into halves, then quarters, and brings it into his mouth and lets the starch layer on top of his tongue and notes the sweetness of it before shallowing. He picks up grilled fish that accompanies his meal, tasting it—ah, salty—and pairs it with a clump of rice to lesson the intensity of the flavour on his palette. A stray bone sticks to his teeth, which Kumado removes inelegantly with his fingers and sets the translucent calcium aside.

He had never _enjoyed_ eating rice before this trial to forcibly awaken ability that Kumado wasn’t sure he ever had the capacity for to begin with. Rice masks the texture of fish bone, forcing him to masticate his food throughly before swallowing. It is bland, something that one does not ever enjoy eating by itself, but is eaten to carry and soften stronger, more savoury flavours like salted mackerel and fermented soybean. Something he eats to fill and sustain himself when well water isn’t enough to alleviate the hunger in his belly. But in these times of fasting alone in the darkness, Kumado is more sensitive to the world around him. He eats more rice while thinking about the flavour of the rice itself because however subtle it may be, rice is not nothing.

His grandfather watches him eat patiently with solemn eyes shining with mild expectation. Kumado eats all of his meals slowly despite the hunger irritating the lining of his stomach and his voracious appetite aggressively spring against his self-control with each bite of food because the longer it takes him to eat, the longer his grandfather stays with him. During their silent meals, Kumado pretends that his grandfather is silently assessing him and that he is pleased with Kumado’s slow but sure progress in opening up his five senses. Rice has flavour and he can hear the world coming more and more alive every day in the way that the darkness becomes scarier and wiggled relentlessly outside of the barriers of his makeshift home.

When Kumado drinks the last of the barley tea, the flame had consumed a third of the string and was almost touching the oil’s surface. His grandfather tidies the tray. “Grandfather,” Kumado says and is surprised by how small his voice was, as if his own flesh and skull sought to absorb most of his sound to keep him muted. He is barely louder than the crackling of fire and the light clanging of bamboo on lacquer, and cracks mid-syllable from little use.

His grandfather hums acknowledgement absent of exasperation. “I will be back tomorrow,” he says, which would have sounded dismissive but it is precisely all that Kumado wanted to know. His knees make a popping sound as he rose, a telltale sign of his grandfather’s advancing age, the weight of the tray against his thighs. The lamp oil sloshes. Kumado lowers his head, forehead almost touching tatami mat, and the room once illuminated goes back to too familiar black and life slows once more to its former lethargic lull.

 

 

*

 

 

And Kumado never doubts because his grandfather did come every day. He is as predictable as sunrise and sunset, but his grandfather is not the sun. The sun was something that outlived his ancestors and will outlive his descendants. His grandfather is elderly, and he is human, as temporal as any other man. His time on earth is limited and will eventually reach its end. With each meal, they are getting closer to that date, and if that day comes before Kumado can see _mushi_ , then who would come to visit him then…? His father?

Sometimes he thinks about this, and covers his head and weeps, allowing all of the pity that he accumulated for himself to leave his body through saline tears. It doesn’t settle well with Kumado. If. If his father were to take over and visit, it could not be with the same routine frequency as his grandfather if he cares to visit at all, and Kumado would be left alone in this darkness for longer stretches with only an erratic heartbeat to count the passage of time. And then, sometimes, Kumado thinks about how his father, like his grandfather, is mortal too, and there is the possibility that the cataract blinding Kumado from seeing the otherworldly will not lift before his father’s demise. He would be truly alone then.

The future feels heavy on his anatomy as if he is wearing too many layers of fabric, the way that sometimes corpses are dressed for their funeral procedurals. He is not allowed to leave this place until he can see _mushi_ , but all Kumado can see is black gloom that hisses between the cracks between wood planks and narrow gaps between tatami mats. On days where his skin feels acutely sensitive, he can feel something squirming underneath his epidermis marching and struggling like suffocating ants between adipose and useless blood that bequeathed him no talent or ability from his ancestors. Maybe he will die here, forsaken for a responsibility he had never asked to inherit and this is where the clan will end. By the time all that is left of him is crumbling calcium matrix, the world will fall into calamity, and it will be because Kumado lacks sight.

Kumado curls, drawing his knees to his chest and scrunches his eyes closed. He presses his thumb against them, rubbing at the skin of his eyelids aggressively as if scraping off a layer of crust. These kind of thoughts distress him, so Kumado tries not to think. It is better to let himself grow exhausted and drift into mindless sleep. He does this as often as he can until one day, even with gargantuan effort, Kumado cannot wake himself up.

 

 

*

 

 

He was maybe five years old. _Be careful_ , his weary mother had cautioned him while her flattened palms smoothened out where the fabric of his yutaka had bunched together. His mother’s words held heavy weight with every intonation, burdened with a kind of tenderness usually reserved for final farewells to young men conscripted to war instead of the young child off to play that he was. Kumado didn’t know why she was so overwrought, only nodding absent-mindedly as she fussed around him, her hand lingering for long moments before moving onto their next task. His back was turned to her when she said again, _be careful,_ and he meandered out of the house and to the nearby field of garland chrysanthemums.

The ground underneath Kumado’s feet was untilled, inconsistent in level and was made further uneven by pebble and wood remains strewn throughout the green. It was a sea of pretty white flowers. He waddled through it, carefully trying not to step on more flowers than he needed to and despite his mother’s earlier admonitions, he tripped on something. Probably a rock. He hadn’t looked, focusing instead on the mud caking onto iron blue dyed fabric, and his stinging knees and smarting palms.

Instead of getting back up, Kumado rolled onto his back. There was no saving his yukata. He laid on the ground and time lapsed by as slowly as the drifting white, wispy clouds above him. He sank a bit into the mud. The flowers stood taller than Kumado was thick, almost tall enough to engulfed him. If he stared up into the sky unfocused, into nothing and everything, sometimes he can make out the faint outlines of transparent beings floating and moving lazily across his vision until his almost-periphery. His pupil moved curiously with them and then they disappear like mist evaporating midair in sunshine into atmosphere.

They weren’t _mushi_ —Kumado’s father had called him stupid when he excitedly asked if they were the other afternoon—but sometimes Kumado pretended that’s what _mushi_ would look like to the untalented eye. Something that was always there, but dissipated the moment that you focused because you weren’t meant to pay such close attention to it. Something mythical. 

Kumado stayed that way, looking at his conjured _mushi_ illusions, until his father came home late into the afternoon from a _mushi-shi_ request from a neighbouring village with an cousin apprentice in tow. Kumado saw his father before he noticed Kumado on the ground. He had turned and said something to him, but Kumado didn’t—couldn’t remember what. 

 

 

*

 

 

The smell of incense is nauseating. 

Kumado had thought briefly before nothingness had consumed him that he had died, but the too sweet, naturally saccharine scent of candied smoke wakes him. Crawling leisurely across the ceiling, Kumado sees creatures that he had never seen before. He blinks, and the vision did not go away. He turns his head, and there is his grandfather staring down at him with glossy eyes and a worried frown. “Do you know who I am?” he asks.

Of course, Kumado thinks. He was his only connection to the world, a reminder that there exists a place that he can return to now that he can see _mushi_. He should have been elated, but Kumado could feel that he is missing something crucial and in its absence, happiness is impossible. All there can be is the strange, pervasive apathy marinating inside of him now that he was given the final piece of his clan’s legacy and duty.

 

 

 


End file.
